Category Archives: Poetry

With apologies to Neil Diamond (Yes, I’m old enough to remember his early performances in the 1960’s) who made a hit out of the song “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” one of my brother priests who was part of a group of us hearing confessions yesterday reminded me of this title. My parish is part of a group of four parishes that hold communal reconciliation liturgies in each one of our churches on Sunday afternoons during Lent. Two on one Sunday and two on the next Sunday, which requires a bit of quick travel between the two parishes to make it to the next church on time. My brother priest referred to it as the “Traveling Reconciliation Show” between yesterday’s two locations.

It is Lent, and many Catholics feel the need to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Many of them don’t for various reasons. I’m not here to judge, but I do find it a powerful encounter with Christ both as penitent and the minister of the sacrament. Sometime I’ll have to write more about my experiences. For now, I offer two poems by a favorite author, Scott Cairns, for your Lenten reflection that might help you prepare for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Take your time with them and ponder what they are revealing. The Sacrament of Reconciliation can stir in the heart the same thoughts and have the same effect as what is written of in the poems.

The Spiteful Jesus

Not the one whose courtesy
and kiss unsought are nonetheless
bestowed. Instead, the largely
more familiar blasphemy
borne to us in the little boat
that first cracked rock at Plymouth
petty, plainly man-inflected
—demi-god established as a club
with which our paling
generations might be beaten
to a bland consistency.

He is angry. He is just. And while
he may have died for us,
it was not gladly. The wayhis prophets talk, you’d think
the whole affair had left him
queerly out of sorts, unspeakably
indignant, more than a little
needy, and quick to dish out
just deserts. I saw him when,
as a boy in church, I first
met souls in hell. I made him
for a corrupt, corrupting fiction when
my own father (mortal that he was)
forgave me everything, unasked.